Parker
Parker is the protagonist of Fragments of a Hologram Rose. He lives in a dark polluted city and ponders about his freshy-finished relationship. Bio Parker spent his childhood in block-wide Fuller domes, where he enjoyed holographic panoramas; that was probably in the "chaos of the nineties". When he was 15, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanese zaibatsu plastics combine, until his 20th birthday when he'd be eligible for full employment. He felt very fortunate, considering how few of the applicants became indentured trainees. The following 3 years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, and every morning they stood in formation singing the company hymns. But he also managed to jump the compound fence at least once a month for girls or the holodrome. So a week before his 19th birthday, having 2 stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he passed the fence for good. He arrived in California during the 3 last days of the revolution. He got to San Francisco, where warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. In Tucson he met a teen girl from New Jersey who all the time analyzed obsessivelly her own horoscope or wept silently without paying attention to what Parker was doing or saying. The last night of the revolution they had sex in a burned-out suburb. Soon after the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. He followed a broken white line lit by flame and ended up to New Mexico. Near midnight he saw a tank exploding 2 miles away, and he crouched in the roadside brush by the highway watching it burn below the pale branches of a bare tree. He saw many armed refugees there. He ended up in Texas where apparently he worked in black market for the following 3 months. He wanted out but people had no safe passage through the army cordons. One late afternoon, near Judy's Jungle, under low greasy cooking smoke, he found a dead woman in a dry creek bed, surrounded by a swarm of flies. Her leather jacket had a hole below her left shoulder blade; its red lining now was black and stiff with dried blood. Searching the creek bed he found a length of brushwood with which he carried the jacket and looked for water to wash it and wear it for the cold night. However he found instead a wrap of plastic and transparent surgical tape in the left pocket, containing nearly an ounce of cocaine. The right pocket held a 10" horn-handled switchblade and 15 ampules of Megacillin-D, worth twice its weight in cocaine. He nailed the knife into a rotten stump to hang the bloody jacket and left it behind. That night, he visited a bar to meet for one of the 'lawyers' who worked passages through the cordon. As he waited he tried his first ASP machine there; 5 mins of gymnastics with a model in a Swiss orbital spa. Soon after, apparently selling the cocaine and the ampules, he partcipated to the hijacking of a truck. By the next year he was in New York with forged papers. He spent Christmastime there and he saw 2 leading firms brought the first portable ASP decks in major department stores. His girlfriend Angela had helped him get his papers, and find his first job in ASP. Parker was unable to sleep without a delta-inducer for 2 years. He owned a Sendai Sleep-Master. At 30 he works as a continuity writer for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the actors. Next summer he argued with Angela, she packed her things and called a cab. Parker stood in the sour and acid rain; the cabby wore respirator and goggles. Parker screamed at the cabby, who called him an asshole and asked twice the fare. Angela didn't look back as the cabby pedalled away giving him the finger. The same time he had trouble sleeping because of power droughts that caused sudden failures of the inducer, and he woke up painfully. He tried to wire it to a battery-operated ASP deck with patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape, so that whenever the inducer turned off, the deck would trigger and transit to delta-ASP. The transition was an implosion into other flesh. He bought an ASP cassette with a yogi which he had watched all of it only once, but it triggered everytime there was a power droughts, and fell asleep 5 minutes into it, countless of times; he knew everything of its first 5 minutes. While Parker slept, power drained from the city's grids in 3 AM; reaching for the ASP deck he stands up to make a cup of coffee with the help from a flashlight. He notices that the pilot light of the inducer goes dark; with a flashlight he searches Angela's now-empty closet. He finds a broken leather sandal strap and a postcard (a white light reflection hologram of a rose) which he feeds to the disposal unit; he also finds an ASP cassette which he inserts in the deck. Smoking on his bed, he ponders if he should play it. Although Angela's tapes never intimidated him before, he persuades himself that some women's tapes disorient him, or that she has recorded a lover. The 3/4 of the tape have been erased and he experiences her vacation in Greece. The inducer's light is burning again now and he lies in darkness, recalling the rose-postcard that he shredded to thousand fragments. He thinks that we are each other's fragments, revealing a whole we'll never know. Is Angela closer to him, more real, now that he saw her tape? Or her absence was more real? As delta swept over him, he remembered the principle of holography, that each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle. category:Hologram Rose category:characters